Morning,
Anyone ever tinker with a CISCO CUCM phone system in an attempt to get data out of a Cisco CUCM system into Sync?
Not Cisco, but we defined our ShoreTel/Mitel phone data to Phocas Sync. Happy to share learnings with you. Dennis
That would be great! We’re not quite at the point yet as we have to get data out of CUCM, but any help you could offer would be wonderful.
This is actually a pretty good idea. I’m fairly new to Phocas, but have been using CUCM for quite a while now. I’m working on loading over our CDR records into Phocas now, and seeing what I can do with them.
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As a followup, I am successfully analyzing our CUCM CDR records in Phocas. I’m not loading the data straight into Phocas. I found that there was some manipulation I needed to do to the data first, to make it a little more useable. So I’m loading the CDR records into a SQL database first and manipulating it there, then syncing from my SQL database over to Phocas.
Obviously, everyone’s CUCM setup is going to be so unique, that some of what I needed to do may not be applicable to others. Some of the manipulations I’m doing in SQL before syncing to Phocas are things such as:
Strip out the first 3 characters of an extension to map it to our store. (Our extensions are 5 digits, with the first 3 being unique to a location.)
Strip out area code and prefix exchange of outside numbers. (This allows me to match these up to a database of area codes and exchanges.)
Compare the origin and destination of a call and mark the call as inbound, outbound, or internal.
I’m also using the SQL database to maintain a table of extensions with users. (This is pulled on a scheduled bases from Active Directory, as we maintain these extensions in AD.) Another table contains a of more static mappings of “special” extensions. Such as paging systems, park numbers, voicemail route points, etc.) And a one more table pulled over from our CRM database, with customer phone numbers. All these tables are also synced over to Phocas to allow me to tie in names with the phone extension and numbers.
I can now show management some dashboards showing inbound calls, outbound calls, inbound calls that went to voicemail, etc. They’re quite excited about it!
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Is you Cisco CUCM in the cloud?
No, it’s on premise.
By any chance, would you be able to place me in touch with your Cisco rep?
Before I start looking into a Phocas implementation, my first challenge is accessing the DB in the cloud. Don’t know whether that is possible or whether software is required. My current Cisco rep says I have to buy software that is rather cost prohibitive so I want a second opinion of this.
Honestly my Cisco provider’s solution is to sell their custom software for analyzing the CDR records as well. We just decided to go another direction ourselves. Not sure if there’s any differences between CUCM in the cloud vs on prem, but what’s happening in ours is CUCM is configured to export the CDR records. It’s simply pointed to an FTP server. The CDR records are exported as a CSV file, then FTP over to the specified FTP server. This is done throughout he day. Then on the other end, you just need a process that runs and imports the exported CSV files into the desired location. In our case, these CSV files are being imported throughout the day into a local SQL server. Then at the end of the day, that SQL data is being synced over to Phocas. The biggest value to some of these 3rd party apps that are being pushed on you is to make it easier sift through those records. There’s a LOT of data that comes through for a simple phone call. And in many cases, there’s more than one record for an individual call. So it takes a bit of understanding to sift your way through and follow a call through different route points, hunt pilots, and such, down to the final DN that answers the call.
In the end, getting that data should be fairly straight forward and easy. Then it’s just a matter of understanding it.
So getting the data seems to be the difficult part. I will have to research that part further because I do agree… as long as I get a .csv file each day there should be no issue converting it into Phocas with a process
We are now capturing our data in flat files each hour, our problem is we don’t have the in house expertise and resources to be able to build a database with these files, I have gone outside my company to see if we can have someone do this for us before I go to Phocas to look at a database solution there.
Thanks for this thread, it has inspired us to get the ball rolling!